there was not, as far as i know, every any introduction of 'abstract' symbols so as to represent numbers, rather letters of the Greek alphabet were used, in either case, with various dashes. the system is quite simple, and letters are assigned in alphabetical order, and in consulting a half decent Greek grammar, the scheme should be laid out. one of the more interesting things about this method is that some letters that dropped out from the letter alphabet where they represented phonemes, still remain strong in numerical representation. i have not seen Roman numerals in greek, though they surely exist, but presumably either in official inscriptions demanded by the Romans or in the late period of their domination by Rome and thereafter.

whiteoctave wrote:i have not seen Roman numerals in greek, though they surely exist, but presumably either in official inscriptions demanded by the Romans or in the late period of their domination by Rome and thereafter.

Roman numerals are silly and unwieldy. Why would any self-respecting Greek use them?

They must have used some kind of abaccus for the calculation and used the numerals only for records. Or for simple calculations they could have used fingers (and toes). Without bothering with numerals, anyway, they could solve up to quadratic equations with a straight rule(without any scale) and a compass.
If they weren't great at addition and substraction, they were the inventor of the purer form of mathematics.

It would be helpful to have some time to read the Elements by Euclid to learn about the way they did math without numbers. A number was replaced by a square, or a rectagle, or a line. And the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and getting a square root, was done by geometrical operations with a rule and a compass. Solving a quadratic equation consists of these five operations. (They got around the problem of irrational numbers by treating one as a side of a square of integer area.)

Thanks for the answer! That sounds like Greek math would be hard to learn. What about today, is it any different?

When Alexander the Great was young he asked Aristotle, his tutor, if there's an easier way to learn math, Aristotle replied that there was no royal road in geometry(to say math). But later Des Cartes had discovered what could be called a royal road in geometry, to say, algebra. Numbers are abstracted into 'unknowns'. These generalized numbers are greatly easy to handle than geometrical objects.